Armelle Tsamo Tontsa
- Country of Origin: Cameroon
- Home University: University of Yaounde 1
- Host University & Country: Universite Paris Saclay - France
- PhD Title: Integrated technology for the discovery and development of wound-healing agents from indigenous medicinal plants for the management of chronic wounds, including Buruli ulcer, in endemic communities in Cameroon
- Year of Completion: 2014
PhD Overview
My research explores the chemistry of Cameroonian biodiversity to address health problems that affect my country directly. I work on medicinal plants, fungi and microorganisms, combining classical phytochemistry with untargeted metabolomics, high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry, molecular networking and NMR-based structure elucidation to identify bioactive molecules within complex natural extracts.
Sustainability Goals
- Gender Equality
- Good Health and Well-being
- Quality Education
About Me
I am a senior lecturer in organic chemistry at the University of Yaoundé I, Cameroon. In our local communities, where infectious and neglected diseases strike, people do not wait for a laboratory. They reach for the plants growing beside their homes. As a chemist, my work begins exactly there: with the question of what, in those leaves and barks, actually heals. I read the chemistry of traditional medicinal plants, fungi and microorganisms the way others read a text, using metabolomics and high-resolution mass spectrometry to find the few molecules that matter among thousands.
With support from Faculty for the Future, I am building an integrated technology to discover wound-healing agents from indigenous medicinal plants in Cameroon to manage chronic wounds. The goal is simple and stubborn: to turn what communities already know into treatments they can trust, made from what grows around them.
I have also learned that the molecule is only half the battle. Science advances through people, and people advance through the way they are judged. With a grant from the InterAcademy Partnership, I work with young academies across Africa to rethink how research is assessed, because the criteria we use decide who gets to do science and whose questions are considered worth asking.
And I mentor. Not only at the bench, interpreting a spectrum or correcting a draft, but around it: the doubt before a first conference, the grant application no one taught you to write, and the pressure to choose between a laboratory and a family. I speak from experience on that last one. I am the mother of three children, and my husband is an academic too; we have built a home where two research careers and a happy family live under the same roof. It is challenging and demanding, but possible. Young women are rarely shown that both can be true, and these are the moments when they leave science. I try to be there for them. My ambition is to set up a laboratory in Cameroon that can characterise its own natural products and valorise its own local resources, and be led by African women whose work needs no translation to be recognised.